Eurofile | What’s Really Cooking in Paris?

Paris just may be the English-speaking world’s favorite non-English-speaking city, which explains why so many Paris lovers take a proprietary interest in the French capital. To wit, they desperately don’t want it to change, which explains why they often react to news that it has with real anguish, even indignation. And if this protectiveness applies to almost everything about the city, it’s often fiercest when it comes to eating there.

I wholeheartedly sympathize with this culinary vigilance — who doesn’t love the city’s cozy bistros with lace curtains and a casserole of boeuf bourguignon simmering away in the kitchen? The reality is that Parisians themselves rarely cook such storied dishes as coq au vin or blanquette de veau at home. Instead, Parisian home cooking, like Parisian restaurant cooking, has become bolder, more creative and much more cosmopolitan during the 24 years I’ve made the city my home. This is why I love Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, “Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes From My Home to Yours.” It’s a terrific reflection of what Parisians are actually eating these days. What Greenspan shrewdly understands is that you can have your gateau and eat it, too, or that contemporary Parisian home cooking has added another delicious layer to those traditional Gallic dishes we all know and love, not replaced it.

“’Around My Paris Table’ isn’t meant to be a cookbook monument to traditional French gastronomy like ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking,’ or Escoffier,” says the amiable Greenspan, the author of such cookery tomes as “Baking: From My Home to Yours” and a part-time Parisian for many years. (Her other compass points are Manhattan and a country house in Connecticut.) “Instead I wanted to write a real-people cookbook that shows how Parisians cook today. So I decided to share those recipes I cook over and over again when I entertain in Paris. Some are French classics, like daube de boeuf — I mean, who doesn’t love daube de boeuf, right? And some are French classics I’ve tweaked and reworked. Some come from chefs, others from friends.” These French pals include everyone from the bistro maven Yves Camdeborde of Le Relais du Comptoir to the pastry chef de luxe Pierre Hermé; from the brilliant restaurateur Hélène Samuel of the Salle Pleyel to the power blogger American-in-Paris David Lebovitz.

She really knows Paris, and unlike the sharp-edged and noisy chatterbox of the current Parisian culinary blogosphere, she has no agenda to promote, no axes to grind; rather, Greenspan just plain loves French food, old and new. And because she’s as companionable a writer as she is a cook, this book is as much fun to read as it is to cook from. If Julia Child was the first to attempt to demystify French cooking for the Stateside home chef, Greenspan succeeds in making it seem eminently doable and easy, with cheerful stand-firsts that often read like Mom’s notes on the door of the fridge but are really much subtler and more useful than that.

Greenspan, whom I first met at a James Beard Foundation dinner 25 years ago, somehow manages to sling this modern French hash just right. In other words, even though serious American home chefs often expect, even want, French recipes to be challenging, really good Parisian cooks today are, as Greenspan says, “just as busy as we are, and so they’re masters of supremely easy but also supremely delicious food. What I’m cooking and my Parisian friends are cooking are dishes that are brighter and lighter than those people often associate with French food — braised pork with lemongrass and cellophane noodles, for example.

“The French press often talks breathlessly about the horrors of globalization,” she continues. “But it works quite nicely in the kitchen, where you can take a spice like star anise or ginger and tweak a Gallic classic to give it a whole new personality. And the other thing that’s so fascinating in France right now is that you have young chefs like Jean-Francois Piège, who ran a monument of a restaurant like Les Ambassadeurs at the Hotel de Crillon, but who does really wonderful offbeat recipes like a tortilla [Spanish-style omelette] made with potato chips. This fluidity between high cooking and ‘low’ cooking is common in France today, and it comes from being really confident in the kitchen and knowing your stuff.”

Greenspan says the way Parisians entertain has evolved in much the same way that her own cooking style has. “When I first started to cook, if I didn’t spend all day in the kitchen, I didn’t believe that whatever I was making would be any good. Now, like so many Parisians, I’m a simpler cook, because inviting people over to dinner is more about the time I’m at the table with my friends than hours spent in the kitchen.” This is why the recipes in Greenspan’s book, which were tested in her American kitchen, are “not formal, not fussy and not technique-driven.”

I’ve cooked my way through a dozen of Greenspan’s recipes, including David Lebovitz’s fabulous seaweed sablé biscuits, Greenspan’s pumpkin-gorgonzola flans and chicken tagine with sweet potatoes and prunes. Ultimately, when it comes to cookbooks, the real proof is whether the volume in question is just a pretty browser of a book or one you find yourself using regularly. And in this context, I give Greenspan’s book my highest rating — it already has an awful lot of splattered pages.

Here are some of Greenspan’s recipes to try at home.

Marie-Hélène’s Apple Cake

Serves 8.

From “Around My French Table,” by Dorie Greenspan.

¾ cup all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

4 large apples (if you can, choose 4 different kinds)

2 large eggs

¾ cup sugar

3 tablespoons dark rum

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Generously butter an 8-inch springform pan. Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper and put the springform on it.

Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in a small bowl.

Peel the apples, cut them in half and remove the cores. Cut the apples into 1- to 2-inch chunks.

In a medium bowl, beat the eggs with a whisk until they’re foamy. Pour in the sugar and whisk for a minute or so to blend. Whisk in the rum and vanilla. Whisk in half the flour and, when it is incorporated, add half the melted butter, followed by the rest of the flour and the remaining butter, mixing gently after each addition so that you have a smooth, rather thick batter. Switch to a rubber spatula and fold in the apples, turning the fruit so that it’s coated with batter. Scrape the mix into the pan and poke it around a little with the spatula so that it’s evenish.

Slide the pan into the oven and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until the top of the cake is golden brown and a knife inserted deep into the center comes out clean; the cake may pull away from the sides of the pan. Transfer to a cooling rack and let rest for 5 minutes.

Carefully run a blunt knife around the edges of the cake and remove the sides of the springform pan. (Open the springform slowly, and before it’s fully opened, make sure there aren’t any apples stuck to it.) Allow the cake to cool until it is just slightly warm or at room temperature. If you want to remove the cake from the bottom of the springform pan, wait until the cake is almost cooled, then run a long spatula between the cake and the pan, cover the top of the cake with a piece of parchment or wax paper, and invert it onto a rack. Carefully remove the bottom of the pan and turn the cake over onto a serving dish.

Serving

The cake can be served warm or at room temperature, with or without a little softly whipped, barely sweetened heavy cream or a spoonful of ice cream. Marie-Hélène served her cake with cinnamon ice cream, and it was a terrific combination.

Storing

The cake will keep for about two days at room temperature and, according to my husband, gets more comforting with each passing day. However long you keep the cake, it’s best not to cover it — it’s too moist. Leave the cake on its plate and just press a piece of plastic wrap or wax paper against the cut surfaces.

M. Jacques’s Armagnac Chicken

Serves 4.

From “Around My French Table,” by Dorie Greenspan.

This recipe, une petite merveille (a little marvel), as the French would say, was given to me years ago by Jacques Drouot, the maître d’hôtel at the famous Le Dôme brasserie in Paris and an inspired home cook. I’ve been making it regularly ever since. It’s one of those remarkable dishes that is comforting, yet more sophisticated than you’d expect (or really have any right to demand, given the basic ingredients and even more basic cooking method).

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 450 degrees. You’ll need a heavy casserole with a tight-fitting cover, one large enough to hold the chicken snugly but still leave room for the vegetables. (I use an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven.)

Put the casserole over medium heat and pour in the oil. When it’s warm, toss in the vegetables and turn them around in the oil for a minute or two until they glisten; season with salt and white pepper. Stir in the herbs and push everything toward the sides of the pot to make way for the chicken. Rub the chicken all over with salt and white pepper, nestle it in the pot, and pour the Armagnac around it. Leave the pot on the heat for a minute to warm the Armagnac, then cover it tightly — if your lid is shaky, cover the pot with a piece of aluminum foil and then put the cover in place.

Slide the casserole into the oven and let the chicken roast undisturbed for 60 minutes.

Transfer the pot to the stove, and carefully remove the lid and the foil, if you used it — make sure to open the lid away from you, because there will be a lot of steam. After admiring the beautifully browned chicken, very carefully transfer it to a warm platter or, better yet, a bowl; cover loosely with a foil tent.

Using a spoon, skim off the fat that will have risen to the top of the cooking liquid and discard it; pick out the bay leaf and discard it too. Turn the heat to medium, stir the vegetables gently to dislodge any that might have stuck to the bottom of the pot, and add the water, stirring to blend it with the pan juices. Simmer for about 5 minutes, or until the sauce thickens ever so slightly, then taste for salt and pepper.

Carve the chicken and serve with the vegetables and sauce.

Serving

You can bring the chicken to the table whole, surrounded by the vegetables, and carve it in public, or you can do what I do, which is to cut the chicken into quarters in the kitchen, then separate the wings from the breasts and the thighs from the legs. I arrange the pieces in a large shallow serving bowl, spoon the vegetables into the center, moisten everything with a little of the sauce and then pour the remainder of the elixir into a sauce boat to pass at the table.

Storing

I can’t imagine that you’ll have anything left over, but if you do, you can reheat the chicken and vegetables — make sure there’s some sauce, so nothing dries out — covered in a microwave oven.

Bonne idée

Armagnac and prunes are a classic combination in France. If you’d like, you can toss 8 to 12 prunes, pitted or not, into the pot along with the herbs. If your prunes are pitted and soft, they might pretty much melt during the cooking, but they’ll make a sweet, lovely addition to the mix.